"Suffering why suffering for what" or "Jeans against Fashism" - currently Kippenberger sayings on Instagram and Twitter are great. Soon his iconic-bad painting titles will probably be added like "I can not find a swastika with the best will". Or his self-ironic confession "He wanted to go up and only came to the middle". For only after the brilliant artist, sculptor and jack-of-all-trades died at the age of 44 did he become an insanely hip artist.
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One might wonder how Martin Kippenberger, if he was still 66 years old today, would have found the social media. On the one hand, Kippenberger hated all fashions and made a poking fun of someone doing something just because the others did. He loved Trash, but loathed kitsch, he found Political Correctness obnoxious.
Kippenberger always rowed against the stream, tirelessly teasing. When all of Germany was eating Italian food, he constructed a plate with a hole in the middle for the Documenta in 1997 and entitled: "Warsaw Mushroom mozzarella tomato with spaghettini secco e vino al dente." Facebook and Instagram? - Martin Kippenberger would probably have disgusted.
He signed pictures with pasted "Kippenbergen"
But it is not that easy, Martin Kippenberger was also so ahead of his time that he dealt with everything that interests the social media today: conceptual self-staging, for example - so he signed some pictures with pasted "Kippenbergen".
He sampled his own work and that of others or had his paintings painted by others. Provocation was his style principle - but his artistic pose had nothing to do with his own position. In addition, he produced self-confident Kalauer, self-referential quotes and rhymes like on the assembly line. He might have hated it, but on Twitter he would have been a star.
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What Kippenberger predicted, how he always questioned his work, how addicted he was to recognition and how current all this is today, is now shown in the Bonn retrospective "Thank you". And it conveys the context in which Kippenberger's works stand. For a long time, his works were perceived to be carelessly injured, which is why German museum directors avoided the artist. Only posthumously clears the haze of the cosmos Kippenberger and the reception is as in Bonn, the people in the center.
"The human being can not be separated from the artist, he has turned his life into an art for almost every part of his life - every festival was a celebration, but at the same time a stage and raw material for new works," writes Susanne Kippenberger in her book about her brother.
The work as an expression of pain and melancholy
That is why curator Susanne Klein provided a lot of background for the 370 mostly witty works in Bonn. When Kippenberger's mother was killed by Euro pallets, he began to work on sculptures made of pallets. If he received a bad review, the painter showed himself with a cardboard sign around his neck: "Please do not throw it out" - from the art business. And he made the life-size sculpture "Martin, off to the corner and shame on you" when a magazine accused him of being a misogynist cynic, consumed with alcohol.
Already earlier exhibitions showed Kippenberger as Verkannte, whose work and wit were an expression of pain and melancholy. "Thank you" would also work without links to the artist's excessive biography. Because the ingeniously crafty paintings, sculptures and drawings and their eponymous derision make in their proximity to real life just fun.
Exhibition: "Martin Kippenberger: Thank you, a retrospective", Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, until 16.2.2020.